Children's injunctive norm beliefs are influenced by descriptive norm information

• In Event: Children's Understanding of Group Dynamics: Group Norms and Group Membership

Abstract

Recent work suggests that by 4-6-years of age, children make normative judgements about how one should behave–injunctive norm beliefs–from what is common in a group–descriptive norm beliefs (Roberts et al., 2016). However, it remains unclear how the strength of the descriptive norm information–that is, how relatively common or uncommon a behavior is–influences injunctive norms beliefs about how we should behave. Furthermore, because children readily distinguish between different kinds of normative behaviors (Smetna, 1984; Yucel et al., 2020), we explored whether the association between descriptive and injunctive norm beliefs varies depending on the kind of normative information.

Here we examined this question in 6-9-year-old children (N = 138) from the US, asking whether children’s injunctive beliefs, moral evaluations, behavioral intentions, and punishment ratings are influenced by descriptive norm information that a behavior is relatively common or uncommon. We tested this in positively valenced conventional behaviors (e.g., cleaning up your lunch tray) and negatively valenced conventional behaviors (talking in the library), as well as novel preferences (writing with a red pen rather than a blue pen) in which we did not expect descriptive norm information to influence injunctive beliefs. Additionally, because the coronavirus pandemic presented a rare opportunity to study how children spontaneously learn new norms, we explored whether their beliefs about covid-related health behaviors were as readily influenced by descriptive norm information as other kinds of behaviors. If children’s beliefs about covid behaviors are resilient to descriptive norms, this might suggest that children rapidly internalized these norms or otherwise view them distinctly from conventional norms. Participants saw eight vignettes corresponding to four different domains of normative behavior: covid behaviors, positive conventional behaviors, negative conventional behaviors, and novel preferences. For all vignettes, children received descriptive norm information between-subjects showing either a strong descriptive norm that the behavior was common, or a weak descriptive norm showing that the behavior was uncommon.

We find that by 6-years of age, children’s injunctive norm beliefs about how they should behave were influenced by descriptive norm information such that children thought the behavior was more injunctive in the strong descriptive norm condition than the weak descriptive norm condition. Children’s moral evaluations and behavioral likelihood were also sensitive to descriptive norm information such that kids evaluated the behavior as more good and were more likely to engage in the behavior when there was a strong descriptive norm. Participants’ beliefs were influenced by descriptive norm information similarly across norm type with the exception of the novel preferences, in which they were largely not sensitive to the descriptive norm or were more influenced by weak than strong descriptive norms. Lastly, we found that children rated not following the positive norms as more deserving of punishment when common but that they rated following the negative norms as more deserving of punishment when uncommon. Overall our results suggest that by middle-childhood children readily update their beliefs and behavior after receiving social information but do so selectively depending on the domain of behavior.

Authors

• Paul Deutchman, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Julia Marshall, Boston College

• Young-Eun Lee, Columbia University

• Felix Warneken, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College